Gleason: Burke grad eased up and wins followed

Friday

Jun 6, 2014 at 9:10 PMJun 7, 2014 at 12:51 AM

John Szefc was the kid hitting, hitting and hitting some more in the batting cage in his backyard growing up. He was the kid in military shape with the military haircut who would do anything to win. He had an edge, you bet he had an edge, because he knew he wasn't the best player so he was going to be the grittiest and hardest-working.

Kevin Gleason

John Szefc was the kid hitting, hitting and hitting some more in the batting cage in his backyard growing up. He was the kid in military shape with the military haircut who would do anything to win. He had an edge, you bet he had an edge, because he knew he wasn't the best player so he was going to be the grittiest and hardest-working.

"Let me tell you something,'' said Dick O'Neill, Szefc's coach at John S. Burke Catholic, "there was no harder worker than this guy.''

"He cared about the game; he cared about his teammates,'' said Tony Mancuso, Szefc's coach for several seasons in a hard-core summer league called the Hudson Valley Rookie League.

The intense, hard-driving player learned an invaluable lesson on the way to becoming a successful college baseball coach. Sometimes you must ease up a bit on the players. Sometimes less is better. Szefc and his staff softened the pedal without igniting cruise control late this season, and they directed a historical baseball season at Maryland.

"We backed off of them,'' Szefc was saying on the phone a couple days after Maryland advanced to the NCAA Super Regionals for the first time in school history. "We were going to go north or south, and it was kind of up to them.''

Breaks from 3﻿1/2-hour practices. Focusing on the positive. An extra half hour curfew here and there. The seemingly inconsequential matter of practicing in shorts instead of pants.

A bunch of little things that helped Maryland turn around its season in May. The Terps won their final six conference games. They almost won the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament and legitimized their first NCAA tourney berth since 1971 by upsetting top-seeded host South Carolina for the Columbia regional last weekend.

Maryland (39-21) enters the start of its best-of-three Super Regional at Virginia Saturday as one of the hottest teams in the country. The Terps, 14-2 since May 2, broke South Carolina's 28-game home postseason win streak and became just the second team in 38 years to win a regional on the Gamecocks' field.

"A lot of things started going well pretty quickly,'' Szefc said. "The end of March and April were really up and down.''

Szefc coached Marist to a 212-137-1 record and four NCAA tourney berths from 1996-2002. He then began a decade-long stint as an assistant at Louisiana-Lafayette, Kansas and Kansas State. Szefc embaraced the long run as an assistant after such success at Marist. He was eager to learn every possible nuance of the game while searching for the right fit as a head coach. Szefc, married with three young children, hoped to connect with a program closer to his Hudson Valley roots.

"Looking for the right opportunity back East near the grandparents,'' he said. "I started looking at a smaller group of places.''

He found that perfect fit at Maryland. Szefc brought his aggressive style to College Park last year, leading the Terps to 30 wins and the most conference victories, 11, since 1971. When things seemed bleak this season, he called upon all those years of coaching and all those hours of playing.

"He understood everything I said about boxing out, making layups, making free throws — all the little things that helped a team win,'' said O'Neill, who coached Szefc in basketball for a few seasons and also in baseball his sophomore year. "And that's what he's put into his coaching.''

"He had the cage in his yard and they would be out there at 8:30, 9 in the morning,'' Mancuso said. "He cared about the game; he cared about his teammates.''

Szefc called Mancuso last summer to remind him that it was the 20th anniversary of their team, the Middletown Explorers, winning a Hudson Valley Rookie League championship. The call didn't surprise Mancuso. Szefc has deep feelings for his baseball roots.

"Those guys were battlers,'' Szefc said of the Explorers in between discussing this weekend's challenge. "Losing was unacceptable playing with those guys. You don't forget those times.''

Szefc still places the same emphasis on winning. Only now, he knows a lot of different ways to win. He has shown that you can do big things by sprinkling some spice on hours of sweat.